Slanting the News on Global Warming

Last night the NBC Evening News was a good example of how the media falsely reports stories about global warming, turning them into propaganda hype instead of factual reporting. The story featured temperature measurements showing alarming warming on the Antarctic peninsula. Most viewers are unfamiliar with the geography of Antarctica and would therefore assume what they were told was representative of the whole continent. That was obviously the intent of the NBC report. It said nothing about the temperatures anywhere else in Antarctica. Nowhere did the program inform viewers that the peninsula is not representative, that it is the part of Antarctica that is furthest from the South Pole, that it comprises only 2 percent of the continent—and that the other 98 percent of the continent has been cooling since regular temperature records began in 1957! Not a word was said about that. So it was obviously dishonest of NBC to claim its story showed evidence of global warming.

I live in Minneapolis. The major newspaper here, the Star Tribune, hypes global warming just like the major TV networks. For years I have tried to get the paper to print something of the scientific evidence to the contrary. I have sent at least 11 letters (I think actually 12 or 13), complete with scientific references so they could verify the truth of my statements, but they never printed one word of any of letters. They simply don't want the public to know the other side. An issue that comes to mind here concerns the melting of the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro. The Star Tribune devoted considerable space to this issue as evidence of global warming: “Perhaps the best line of evidence for global warming is the melting of mountain ice caps in the tropics….Given rates of current melting, there will be no ice on top of Mount Kilimanjaro…within the next couple of decades.”

But history and satellite temperature measurements tell a different story. Measurements were made of the Kilimanjaro ice cap in 1912, 1953, 1976, 1989 and 2000. Kilimanjaro lost 45 percent of its icecap between 1912 and 1953. Had this trend continued, those glaciers would already be gone. But the period 1953 to 1976 was a period of global COOLING (minus 0.13 degree F)—and Kilimanjaro’s glaciers still lost another 21 percent! Another 12 percent has disappeared since 1976, the lowest rate since 1912. Thus, contrary to the hype of the global warming proponents, Kilimanjaro’s icecap has been melting more slowly in recent decades, not faster.

Moreover, since 1979, we have satellite temperature measurements, which are far more accurate than ground-based measurements and give us measurements at various elevations. At the height of Mt. Kilimanjaro, 19,000 feet, they show a COOLING of the Kilimanjaro area of 0.40 degrees F. since 1979. This cooling rate (0.17 degrees F. per decade) is exactly the same as the warming rate from 1912 to 1953. Kilimanjaro is just one more example of trying to scare the public with a global warming story that has no basis in fact.